The Schizotopia conference will take place the 18th to 21st of January 2018 and includes the participation of 100 invited design students, fine art students and teachers. Apart from that, external experts from the field of Art, Philosophy and Medicine, are invited to open up different perspectives on the connection between Schizophrenia and creativity. The conference is a collaboration between the art Universities in Bremen, Karlsruhe, Lyon, Bordeaux, Oslo and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
Visitors from the outside are also welcome to visit the event and take part in our activities.

In the text ”On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia” (1919), the Psycho-analyst Viktor Tausk describes a recurring phenomenon of a mystical machine-like mechanism, consisting of typical machine attributes like: bells, levers, cog wheels and whistles, in the testimonies of patients diagnosed with Schizophrenia. The machine works as an external, malicious control agent, manipulating the thoughts and behaviors of the patient. The complexity of its construction always exceeds the patient’s comprehension and is up to date with the latest technology. The Influencing machine projects pictures, adds and removes thoughts, creates motoric phenomena, and indescribable pathological sensations, that altogether represents many of the symptoms associated with Schizophrenia.

While Tausk, like Freud, interpreted Schizophrenia as an ego-deficiency and a weakened notion of the self, which was symptomatically illustrated by how the Influencing-machine interferes with and distributes the patients inner life, Gilles Deleuze and Guattari inversed the concepts in the early 1970’s and defined the idea of the normalized ego and body, detached from the rest of the world, as a paranoid delusion, attributed to psycho-analysis and the oedipal triangulation (mother-father-child). They meant that psychoanalysis was mainly a way to conform the fragmented and nomadic soul to the real illness: the underlying social structures of our society and capitalism in particular. Where Tausk in the Influencing machine found a metaphor for mental illness on the individual level, Deleuze and Guattari saw a social illness and the Influence machine as a potential remedy. Through Schizo-analysis they proposed a productive utilization of the transcending ego, as a way to release suppressed desires and open up new areas of exchange and interaction, where we instead of adapting the psyche to fit the machine, creates machines that works with and through our minds: the Schizo-machines.

The conference Schizotopia will be based around the connection and activation of six different machines in the Auditorium of the HfK in Bremen, representing the six participating Art Universities.

By “machine" we employ the broadest possible definition of the phenomenon, inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ideas about "Desiring-machines" as described in ”Anti-Oedipus” (1971): organisms driven by collective energy, self-preservation and instinct, consisting of a working part, a driving and part that connects to other machines. To make these connections, each group, consisting of students from the participating schools, needs to adapt their outgoing plug to the next machine’s ingoing contact interface. How the ingoing impulse will affect the function of the next machine, is up to the groups to determine and something that will be implemented and tried out during the conference.
The purpose of the machines is to create a perpetual motion, throughout the event and at the same time to produce documentation, records, of as well their own function as the surrounding context. The machines most important function is to connect the participating students and the visitors of the conference in a collective effort to make a working circuit of the six machines. What is produced by the machine works as a necessary distraction, in order to grasp its actual meaning.

Simultaneously with the machine building and operation, lectures will be hold from a podium integrated in the Bremen mother machine. There will also be continuous workshops, both in the Auditorium, and in three satellite spaces at the school: The Foyer, the Conference room and the Segment. In the Segment all documentation is organized and exhibited, the Conference room is for contemplation, discussion and reflection and the Foyer is where nothing can really happen (but everything does).

Bardhi Haliti (moderator)

Graphic designer in Amsterdam, organizer of the REDO conference in Prishtina.redoconf.com

Simon Kyaga

Psychiatrist and researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.simonkyaga.se

Uwe Gonther

Professor in Psychiatry in Bremen and honorarar professor at HKS in Ottersberg.gonther.hks

JABOLEX aka Breze Instituut is a three-headed human-machine program for live music performance that was designed in Bremen, Germany. It’s sounds oscillate between primitive kraut repetition, immersive noise studies and shameless party bangers.soundcloud